Too Good To Be True

Adversity has nothing to do with finding a receiver in double coverage with a blitzing linebacker in your face. Or taking over for an injured starter and leading a team to an undefeated start.

And making only $254,000 to play football does not come close.

Compared to a young boy's battle to see, walk and talk, compared to a struggling mother's loss of her parents in a tornado, compared to the life Kurt Warner has lived and seen, the NFL's brand of adversity seems trivial and laughable.

"I think I came into this with a healthy sense of perspective," said Warner, who has shocked the NFL by going from an unknown, 28-year-old backup to the hottest quarterback in the league and a big reason the St. Louis Rams are 4-0. "I'm not going to get too up or too down about football."

There have been good times, too, great ones actually, but even a rout of the San Francisco 49ers appears relatively unimportant compared to the small victories that have helped make Warner the biggest success story sports has seen in too long.

"It's just a wonderful story," said Mark Bartelstein, Warner's agent. "I can't think of anyone more deserving. He's worked as hard as you could possibly work to get where he is, and he is just a great person, too."

At a time when the NFL is overloaded with tales of champs turning into chumps, superstars holding out or retiring and injuries costing great players their seasons and, perhaps, their careers, Warner's arrival out of nowhere, or Iowa -- same difference -- has been as well-timed as the touchdown passes he throws to Isaac Bruce.

His life is a made-for-television movie waiting to happen, and even if the Rams do not reach the Super Bowl, dramatic license would require a script rewrite to give this story the ending it deserves. After all, Warner has gone from bagging groceries in a 24-hour market to breaking the NFL record for touchdown passes in a player's first four starts (14). He has worked with at-risk teen-agers in a program he helped start with the YMCA, and he survived a season in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with his faith and values intact.

There are times when Warner seems too good to be true, but Rams coach and general manager Dick Vermeil insists, "This kid is the real thing."

"Kurt is a tremendous person," said John Gregory, Warner's coach with the Arena Football League's Iowa Barnstormers. "He always had a lot of talent and worked hard, but he just needed to get an opportunity to show what he could do."

Warner got that in the preseason when Chargers safety Rodney Harrison hit Rams quarterback Trent Green in the knee, tearing ligaments and knocking him out for the season. Suddenly, the Rams offense was in the hands of a quarterback who impressed them so little that they left him exposed for the Cleveland Browns in the expansion draft.

Fortunately for the Rams, the Browns did as St. Louis executives expected and passed on Warner because they planned to draft Tim Couch with the No. 1 pick and sign veteran free agent Ty Detmer.

"Now we would have looked like fools if they had taken him, but in our thinking and calculation, we did not think he would go," Vermeil said.

Of course, no one expected such greatness out of Warner, who got a spot in NFL Europe only because Amsterdam Admirals executives convinced the Rams to sign him for next to nothing and assign him to the minor league across the Atlantic. They already had tried with 12 teams, but there were no other takers for a quarterback who lit up the Arena League but was waived by the Packers in his only NFL camp as an undrafted rookie in 1994.

"I always believed that I had the ability, and I always hoped that I would get the opportunity," Warner said. "But I can't say that I knew it would happen.

"I was playing because I love the game. I was having a lot of fun. I was able to take care of my family. I was just waiting to see what the Lord had in store for me, and whether that was to stay in Arena football or whether it took me to where I am today."

Warner is not the stereotypical jock whose life consists of football, fast cars and faster women. Instead, he is a quiet, unassuming man, the kind usually found on Cedar Rapids Sundays in a church pew, not an athletic field.

"You get to know the young man, you see that he is a very humble, sincere human being," Vermeil said. "I mean, he is not even today awed by all this. He is excited it is going well, but he hasn't changed a bit in his demeanor."